“Fed tapering” seems to be repeated in every single story in the financial media over the last couple of days. However, I am afraid that the financial media – as often is the case – is overly US centric. We might want to look at another central bank than the Fed. We should instead pay some (a lot!) of attention to the People’s Bank of China (PBoC).

This is from CNBC:

“China’s central bank continued to test the resilience of local lenders to withstand a cash crunch on Thursday, as money market rates soared once again and short-term rates hit record highs.

The seven-day repo rate, which is seen as gauge of confidence to lend in the interbank market, rose to a record high above 10 percent. China’s overnight repo rate jumped to as high as 30 percent, analysts said.

Chinese money markets have suffered a severe liquidity strain in the past week, due to seasonal factors and a sharp slowdown in foreign exchange inflows, raising concerns about the financial risks facing the world’s second largest economy.

But to the surprise of many market participants, the central bank has held back from pumping cash into the market to ease the credit squeeze and analysts said a spike in the rates at which banks lend money to each other was also a concern. “

I can’t help thinking that we have seen this before. The fed and ECB actions in 2008 come to mind.

This is what I said in my post “Dangerous bubbles fears” in October last year:

“…the PBoC eased monetary policy aggressively in 2009 and that pulled the Chinese economy out of the crisis very fast, but since 2010 the PBoC obviously has become fearful that it had created a bubble – which is probably did. To me Chinese monetary policy probably became excessively easy in early 2010 so it was right to scale back on monetary easing, but money supply growth has slowed very dramatically in the last two years and monetary policy now seem to have become excessively tight.”

It seems to me that the PBoC is just continuing the excessive tightening and that seems to be the real culprit behind the stream of bad economic data we have got out of China recently. It looks like Chinese monetary policy failure.

So yes, Bernanke might have a communication problem, but at the moment it seems like the biggest monetary policy failure is Chinese rather than American.

PS it seems like the Bank of Japan is regaining some credibility – the Nikkei has been remarkably resilient in recent days.